Andreea Alexandru

University of Pennsylvania

PhD Candidate

Andreea Alexandru is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, working with prof. George Pappas and prof. Ali Jadbabaie. Previously, Andreea received the B.Eng. degree in Automatic Control and Systems Engineering from Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania, where she was valedictorian. Her research interests lie in privacy and security of control systems and machine learning. She uses cryptographic and information-theoretic tools to enable private solutions for processing data arising from critical infrastructure and user-related sensitive queries. Andreea holds three nominations for student best paper awards. In 2019, she received an NSF iREDEFINE Professional Development Award. Andreea held internships at Duality Technologies in 2019, where she developed and optimized software for encrypted computing applications, and at Philips Research in 2014, where she worked on automated diagnosis algorithms.

Research Abstract :

My research explores the emerging field of privacy and security for Internet of Things control, where it bridges dynamical systems and computations on encrypted data, using applied cryptography and information-theoretic tools. My work deals with designing interactive protocols for private cloud-outsourced computations. Examples include privately solving constrained optimization problems, estimating the state and computing the control actions from private measurements arising from critical infrastructure or robots deployed in unreliable environments. My work also covers distributed control with private model and signals in applications such as smart grid control. In these scenarios, we require computational privacy and stipulate that each participant is allowed to learn nothing more than its own result of the computation. We achieve this demanding privacy goal by using two layers of encryption for the communicated data, leveraging homomorphic encryption and secret sharing schemes.